An eclectic blog on which appears daily one-thousand word essays on somethingorother.

Saturday, January 28, 2017

GANGSTALKING. EEKS.

“Predatory Gangstalking is an umbrella term describing a series of techniques utilized by organized crime and corrupt networks to instill mental instability within a victim with the intent to discredit, sabotage, harass, extort and even drive a victim to suicide.”

This description is from Reddit, which is unedited, uninformed, and sensational, but the point is clear. It’s just inflated past the usual. A group of people can target one or (I suppose) a few people because of some motive of their own or because they sense vulnerability, and then enjoy driving them over the edge of their mental, emotional, and possibly physical resources. Maybe for the fun of it. Evidently they don’t have anything better to do, like school and jobs.

When I was a primary school crybaby (1945-48), I was often the victim, which makes me try not to join in such activities today. It’s easy to get drawn in by gossip. It wasn’t just me. At the time, all of Germany gangstalked the Jewish people and ended as murderers.

When I tried to return to teaching a few years ago, the high school kids were active in this way but not to this degree, except when they triggered suicides. With pocket iphones, it’s easy — almost inevitable — to gather a group and, of course, a group needs a goal. Picking an outsider, someone stigmatized, is ever so easy. Often the adults have no idea it is happening. But we have discovered that immature adults can even join, acting through their own children or by pretending to be children. At this high school the smart kids had formed a little defensive group because the biggest offense was “thinking you’re better.”

In unguarded moments I find myself attacking the high school for being so destructive. Am I a stalker after a gang? I didn’t take names, except for the administrators. They’re gone now.

I suppose the difference between plain old mobs and a gang that stalks is a matter of strategy and goals. In today’s world gangs are often structured because they are financed through drug deals and dispensing. Where there’s profit, there’s organization. Someone has a plan. Endless plots for movie writers and novelists. That’s probably my best excuse.

Endless images for brains: shadowy figures; men sitting in cars smoking; silhouettes in windows, possibly with telescopes and cameras, a dark movement in the foliage. In Westerns, someone on their belly high up on a butte, glassing a road that leads into a narrow pass. If the mind decides to see these familiar images in snatches of glimpsed reality, it is only natural. There are not very many ways, aside from a screenwriter, to find out what’s really going on. But your brain can and will fabulize, creating significance. No one likes being insignificant, except as a way of escaping observation. But not getting attention can trigger stalking as retaliation. These days stalking can escalate into shooting.

“If you believe you're the subject of a carefully coordinated campaign of bullying that takes the form of stalking, involving large numbers of people you interact with, including complete strangers, neighbours, public service employees, workmates and so on, whose actions take the form of making subtle gestures that you find offensive, uttering keywords or phrases to covertly just letting you know they’re stalking you, e.g. by watching you from a distance or covertly following you around, with the effect of manipulating you, subduing you, making you think you're insane and causing extreme distress, this page is for you and trusted members of your family and friends. Similarly, if you’re worried about the subject after finding information about it elsewhere, this may help.”

I’d be skeptical about that “helping”. It’s a great way of raising money — to stir up fear and then offer a cure. This is very much a recipe for paranoia. The word breaks apart into “para” (not the mainstream reality) and “noia” which is knowing. The boundary between reality and delusion can be muddled, not just for individuals but for whole nations.

Simply asking questions out of curiosity can be felt as stalking, invasion, being targeted. And it is not pleasant to be accused of imagining things, which adds worry about sanity to the burden. There are stories, films, about people who are different or pathological who end up being victims of stalking. Peter Matthiessen spent a good part of his writing career researching and exploring a man named “Wilson” who exploited and killed his neighbors. After accumulating years of stories and injuries, they finally went together and eliminated him. They didn’t stalk him, they just killed him. Why was Matthiessen so intrigued? Maybe because he presented himself as a man of conscience but he actually was a spy. How the two fit together is the puzzle. Maybe the key puzzle of being human.

Probably we don’t think of Facebook as a gang stalker, but they are exactly that, accumulating your online data in the tiniest detail and then using what they learn, grouped into mass data algorithms to suppress or exaggerate the effect they want, like voting. Trump’s missing voters, the illegal ones that no one can find, were actually data points in media surveys. They weren’t individuals, but clustered data points with identities erased. Too fancy for him to understand — or maybe they didn’t tell him — that they were data from specially filtered groups, not the American voters at large. Not only were they filtered by their Facebook-like information, but also by their addresses which are important because the voting districts are so gerrymandered by now. Birds of a feather roost together. The Facebook-like construct was more accurate than any polls.

The most effective snooping is undetected. In a highly technical world, this becomes far easier. By definition, internet knowledge is “para” knowing. I suppose there’s such a thing as “high intel” with skillful “spycraft” as opposed to “low” stalking and haunting. The former are in Masterpiece Theatre productions (Alec Guinness coming in from the cold) and the latter are, well, your little brother looking for blackmail material.

I’m saying that stalking and spying are human impulses that are universal, but that they are normally shaped by standards of conduct, the law, and how much time there is — I mean, how long can a person sit in a car watching for the unknown? Also, maturity on the part of the stalker (esp if they are cops) and something on the part of the stalkee. What?